The Perfect Webcation

By

Ralph Gardner Jr.

Updated Jan. 31, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

Whenever it starts snowing for the fourth day in a row I dream of sitting on a tropical beach with a pina colada in my hand, or some similar cliché. However, after checking my bank balance and discovering it registering in the negative numbers, I go to my Caribbean webcams instead.

I simply click on the link to a beach or seaside restaurant I've visited in the past and watch real-time images of fortunate tourists in T-shirts and shorts, or sailboats trolling crystalline waters. Then I fantasize about what it would feel like to be down there snorkeling in one of my favorite spots rather than up here mustering the energy to dig out my car from under two feet of ice.

ENLARGE

A view of Tortola, part of the British Virgin Islands, from the restaurant Pussers Landing.
Getty Images

I don't know if anyone else shares this masochistic habit. But these days you can go online, find webcams installed at beloved resorts (or close enough), follow the action as you recall your own good times, and plot your return. The process is not without flaws. The cameras are often not maintained as well as they should be, or at all, and even when they're functioning smoothly the images they're transmitting can be pretty smudgy. And at night you're usually looking at a black screen. But there's still a delightful voyeuristic element about it.

One of the resorts I check from time to time is Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, which I've been visiting for years. There are at least two-dozen webcams on Tortola and surrounding islands, five of them belonging to a company with the unfortunate name of Pussers, which merchandises rum and runs several restaurants. "Pussers" apparently is a corruption of "purser," the officer on ship responsible for the daily issue of rum.

While I'm grateful to Pussers for maintaining its webcams, for some reason they've never had one at their restaurant at Soper's Hole, a scenic marina on the west end of the island, and site of the Pussers my family and I most often patronize.

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A screen grab of a webcam of the area.
Pusser's West Indies

I saw an opportunity to bring this oversight to the attention of Charles Tobias, Pussers' founder and chairman, when I received a pre-Christmas email touting the company's rum cake. I believe it was just a coincidence the missive landed in my mailbox; Mr. Tobias couldn't have known that I was familiar with his little island, let alone that I was a customer.

When I got the restaurateur, an ex-Marine who moved to the British Virgin Islands in the '70s, on the phone, he started checking off all the places where Pussers did have webcams, including the bar at its restaurant in Road Town, Tortola's capital. I explained that this was well and good, but that if I wanted to watch people get sloshed indoors I could put on my boots and visit any of several dozen bars in my neighborhood.

He saw my point. "Guys with mistresses have to be very careful in there," he noted, as we watched the bar action from our respective locations and computers. "Maybe that's why business is down."

He claimed instantly to see the virtue of installing a camera at Pussers Landing, his West End location—though I suspect his cooperativeness might have had something to do with his desire to persuade me of the charms of his rum cake, which I'll get to momentarily. "It would be a great place to put one," he said, thinking out loud—and referring to a camera, not a holiday cake. "I guess we will, probably right after the first of the year. Overlooking the harbor from our second floor."

Now about the rum cake, which comes in a decorative tin and costs slightly under 30 bucks. I don't love rum or rum cake. But this one is very good—light, buttery and, with three ounces of alcohol, mildly intoxicating. Even more to my amazement, it's made on Tortola, which isn't known for its bakeries. Indeed, part of Pussers' achievement is that it's an outpost of relative American-style efficiency amid the laid-back ethos of the Caribbean (which shouldn't be mistaken for incompetence, though it took me years to recognize the difference).

In any case, Mr. Tobias, who I've never met but who sounds a lot like John Wayne on the phone, was true to his word. Last week I went online and discovered that he had indeed installed a webcam at West End. He's still working out the kinks: The first time I checked, the camera was focused on the restaurant's outdoor patio rather than the marina, showing diners enjoying the 85-degree warmth of a tropical evening.

The next morning the angle had been shifted to the dock, and a guy in a sailboat. I called Mr. Tobias to thank him, and also to suggest we move the camera slightly to the left to give a better view of the harbor. I wasn't being presumptuous; he told me that after he installed it he'd give me a call and we'd work out the angle together.

"Go back on the site and move it," he growled at his tech guy, who was on the other phone. Then he asked me more gently, "Do you want to look down the fiord or across towards the customs dock? We can physically track it a certain amount of degrees remotely.

"We wanted to move it," he apologized, referring to the spot where the camera was mounted on the restaurant, "but there are too many palm trees."

Too many palm trees? What I'd give for even one palm tree at this moment.

A bigger problem was that the images were on a loop. Instead of streaming live, the camera was showing the same couple of pictures over and over again. "I'm looking at the same loop I looked at 10 minutes ago," he snarled at his tech guy.

I have no doubt that if anyone can get results on Tortola, it's Charles Tobias. My next goal is to have him expand beyond rum cake and open up a bakery that makes baguettes and pastries. Preferably on West End, where I can shop during my next visit. Until then, I can watch sailors and tourists provisioning there over our new webcam.

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